Lately, I seem to be drawn to books with depictions of awkward mother-daughter relationships. Darling Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel has such a pair, though awkward is a bit...mild to describe it.
Rose Gold grows up sickly and friendless, in a wheelchair, too thin and with a shaved head and a multitude of illnesses and frailties. Her mother Patty homeschools her and shuttles her from doctor to doctor and hospital to hospital. Rose Gold is sheltered and grateful for her mother's care and protection. Until Rose Gold learns that her mother has been poisoning her--and her supposed illnesses are apparently her mother's design or fabrication. Or so she (and the rest of Deadwick, and the country) believes.
The chapters alternate in voice and time, from Rose Gold during the intervening five years when her mother was incarcerated for child abuse, to Patty when Rose Gold, now grown up and with a son Adam, takes Patty in after she is released from prison. All is apparently forgiven, on both sides (which is of course hard to believe). Or is it?
It's hard to know which woman to cheer for. Just as you feel sympathetic for mother or daughter, she does something that makes you recoil in dismay or horror, and your sympathy shifts. Until you turn the page. This constant shifting, and the complexity of the characters (including Rose Gold's half-siblings, frenemy Alex, and online boyfriend Phil) and the issues they deal with, make this a great book for discussion groups.
No "happy" ending is really possible, and the impending doom of a dark outcome for Patty or Rose Gold, if not both, pervades the book. But the conclusion is surprising and apt and plausible.
The author researched Munchausen by proxy, by which a child's biological parent, exaggerates or deliberately causes symptoms of illness in the child, due to mental illness. She specifically mentions famous Gypsy Rose Blanchard in the bibliography/notes, though a reader need not know any details of that case to be drawn to Wrobel's debut novel.
I read an arc of Darling Rose Gold and was disappointed. The book was depressing with unlikable characters. There were several side stories with no relevance to the storyline, I felt like I was all over the place. The ending was unsatisfactory.
Oh my, there are some twisted, manipulative characters in this book! I couldn't stop reading, though. And I really liked the ending.
